Safa going slowly

While Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Alberto Parreira re-routes to the obscure Germiston Stadium tonight to continue his preparation for the African Nations Cup tournament in Ghana with what has been termed “a training game” against Lesotho, Safa appear to be going nowhere at all after what was seemingly a severe tongue-lashing from Fifa president Sepp Blatter over the lack of progress of the national team.

The Fifa president emphasised the need for a competitive home team to ensure the success of the 2010 World Cup, but Safa’s somewhat inane response, at a meeting of the executive on Saturday, was to appoint three additonal members from among themselves to assist head of delegation Mandla Mazibuko in Ghana.

The three additional Safa executive members bound for Ghana will be vice-president Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana, Obakeng Molatedi and Vernon Seymour.

Molatedi will be the assistant head of delegation, while Nonkonyana and Seymour will act in overseeing roles.

But whether any of them have the much-needed potency in their boots to solve Parreira’s seemingly chronic scoring problems is another matter.

Also questionable is the decision to utilise the game against Lesotho as no more than a training venture — which, incidentally, is not preventing Safa from charging an admission fee — with a bona fide international surely providing better experience for a squad made up, to a large extent, of untested players at this level.

Perhaps it is Parreira’s intention to make wholesale experiments that could go beyond Fifa’s perimeters of international game rulings — or is it simply that a possible defeat in the official records against minnows Lesotho is a fate to horrible to contemplate? Also, Parreira and his technical team have admitted to having a massive 70 potential candidates for the squad for Ghana, with newcomers at Germiston tonight swelling the numbers.

It has been suggested that, with the Nations Cup starting in less than two months, it might be better to cut the number of candidates instead of increasing them.

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